Editorial: Emerging Technologies and Blockchain in Action: Applications in Supply Chain Management and Energy

Abstract

Blockchain technology established itself as a research subject in various scientific disciplines and as an enabling technology in various indiustries. In supply chain management and energy, blockchain applications establish trustful and traceable relations between multiple organizations (Guerpinar et al., 2020a; Düdder et al.). By securing data in a unique way, organizations are enabled to come to a consensus without any central authority involved. Furthermore, processes and transactions are executed in a trustful, transparent manner and automatized by the utilization of blockchain-based smart contracts (Jakob et al., 2018; Guerpinar et al., 2020b). Still, enterprises only recently begin to adopt the technology and scholars yet see a lot of open research questions in multiple disciplines (Gürpinar et al., 2019; Grosse et al., 2021). While enterprises profit from initiatives like Blockchain Europe that built communities, connect players in the blockchain space and offer open source solutions, we encourage academic scholars to submit their ideas for articles to our research topic and take forward blockchain research in supply chain management and energy together with our team of reviewers and editors. The article series that was recently published in our research topic offers insights into how blockchain technology improves both the supply chain management and energy sector. The first part of the series starts with an overarching analysis of blockchain projects covering the years from 2010 to 2020 and sheds light on the interdisciplinary character of the technology that can be observed from multiple perspectives. The second part continues with a focus on concrete blockchain applications. Here, the use of intelligent smart contracts is explained and illustrates the necessitiy of various enterprise functions to successfully utilize the technology as outlined in the first part. The series concludes by introducing two more applications: a framework for supply chain provenance and a multi-stakeholder approach for transactive energy systems. Edited and reviewed by: Roman Vitenberg, University of Oslo, Norway